An inflation hedge is an investment intended to protect the investor against—hedge—a decrease in the purchasing power of money—inflation. There is no investment known to be a successful hedge in all inflationary environments, just as there is no asset class guaranteed to increase in value in non-inflationary times.
Michael Edward Novogratz is an American investor, formerly of the investment firm Fortress Investment Group. He is currently CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners which focuses on investments in cryptocurrency.
A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It is a decentralized system for verifying that the parties to a transaction have the money they claim to have, eliminating the need for traditional intermediaries, such as banks, when funds are being transferred between two entities.
Circle began as a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) is a venture capital company focusing on the digital currency market. It is located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company has five subsidiaries: CoinDesk, Foundry, Genesis, Grayscale Investments, and Luno.
Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc, and is registered in the British Virgin Islands. Bitfinex was founded in 2012. It was originally a peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange, and later added support for other cryptocurrencies.
Abra is a financial services and technology company that operates a cryptocurrency wallet service including a trading service for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, a service for earning interest on cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, and a lending services for borrowing against cryptocurrency collateral.
An initial coin offering (ICO) or initial currency offering is a type of funding using cryptocurrencies. It is often a form of crowdfunding, although a private ICO which does not seek public investment is also possible. In an ICO, a quantity of cryptocurrency is sold in the form of "tokens" ("coins") to speculators or investors, in exchange for legal tender or other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether. The tokens are promoted as future functional units of currency if or when the ICO's funding goal is met and the project successfully launches.
A cryptocurrency bubble is a phenomenon where the market increasingly considers the going price of cryptocurrency assets to be inflated against their hypothetical value. The history of cryptocurrency has been marked by several speculative bubbles.
Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is a global company that operates the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies. Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, a developer who had previously created high frequency trading software. Binance was initially based in China, then moved its headquarters to Singapore shortly before the Chinese government imposed regulations on cryptocurrency trading. Binance subsequently left Singapore in late 2021 and after that, had no official company headquarters.
Cryptocurrency and crime describes notable examples of cybercrime related to theft of cryptocurrencies and some of the methods or security vulnerabilities commonly exploited. Cryptojacking is a form of cybercrime specific to cryptocurrencies that has been used on websites to hijack a victim's resources and use them for hashing and mining cryptocurrency.
Changpeng Zhao, commonly known as CZ, is a Chinese-born Canadian businessman, investor, and software engineer. Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume as of July 2022.
BitMEX is a cryptocurrency exchange and derivative trading platform. It is owned and operated by HDR Global Trading Limited, which is registered in the Seychelles.
Anthony Di Iorio is a Canadian entrepreneur primarily known as a co-founder of Ethereum and an early investor in Bitcoin. Di Iorio is the founder and CEO of the blockchain company Decentral, and the associated Jaxx wallet. He also served as the first chief digital officer of the Toronto Stock Exchange. In February 2018, Forbes estimated his net worth at $750 million–$1 billion.
Olaf Carlson-Wee is an American entrepreneur and the CEO of cryptocurrency fund Polychain Capital, which he founded in 2016. He was the first employee of Coinbase. Carlson-Wee was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2018.
Polychain Capital (Polychain) is an American investment firm based in San Francisco, California. The firm focuses on investments related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Bitpanda GmbH is an Austrian company headquartered in Vienna. Bitpanda's mobile app provides access to its trading platform, which provides a cryptocurrency exchange, commodities and securities trading, and ETFs. In 2021, Bitpanda achieved a valuation of over four billion US dollars and had nearly 2.7 million customers and almost 500 employees.
Environmental effects of bitcoin comprise increased carbon emissions and electronic waste accumulation, causing the cryptocurrency to have a negative impact on Earth's climate and the natural environment through pollution. Bitcoins are produced through a time- and energy-consuming process called mining, which uses electricity partially generated by gas and coal-fired power plants that emit greenhouse gases. As of 2022, such bitcoin mining is estimated to be responsible for 0.1% of world greenhouse gas emissions. An August 2023 study found Bitcoin mining represented about 0.38% of global electricity consumption. Bitcoins are usually mined on specialized computer equipment, which has a short life expectancy. As of 2021, bitcoin mining was estimated to produce 30,000 tonnes of annual e-waste, which is comparable to the e-waste production of the Netherlands.
Three Arrows Capital was a Singapore-based cryptocurrency hedge fund which was ordered to liquidate on 27 June 2022 by a court in the British Virgin Islands. It was founded in 2012 by Kyle Davies and Su Zhu. The company borrowed billions of dollars to fund its trading, and according to July 2022 bankruptcy filings, faces $3.5 billion in creditors' claims. The fund appears to have lost in excess of $3 billion over 2021 and 2022, making its collapse one of the largest hedge-fund trading losses of all time.
Grayscale Investments is an American digital currency asset management company and subsidiary of Digital Currency Group founded in 2013 and based in Stamford, Connecticut.
